Eugenics; Sexual ethics; Women -- Social and moral questions
Social Hygiene and Legal Compulsion--The Binding Force of Custom
among Savages--The Dissolving Influence of Civilization--The
Distinction between Immorality and Criminality--Adultery as a
Crime--The Tests of Criminality--National Differences in laying
down the Boundary between Criminal and Immoral
Acts--France--Germany--England--The United States--Police
Administration--Police Methods in the United States--National
Differences in the Regulation of the Trade in Alcohol--Prohibition
in the United States--Origin of the American Method of Dealing with
Immorality--Russia--Historical Fluctuations in Methods of dealing
with Immorality and Prostitution--Homosexuality--Holland--The Age
of Consent--Moral Legislation in England--In the United States--The
Raines Law--American Attempts to Suppress Prostitution--Their
Futility--German Methods of Regulating Prostitution--The Sound
Method of Approaching Immorality--Training in Sexual
Hygiene--Education in Personal and Social Responsibility.
The modern development of Social Hygiene in matters of Eugenics has
already sufficed to show that there are certain people in the community,
anxious to take quick cuts to the millennium, who think that Eugenics
can be promoted by hasty legislation. That method of attempting to
further social progress is not new. It has been practised with signal
lack of success for several thousand years. Therefore, if Social Hygiene
is really to progress among us on sane and fundamental lines, it is
necessary for us to realize clearly the mistakes of the past. Again and
again the blind haste of over-zealous reformers has led not to
progress, but to retrogression. The excellent intentions of such social
reformers have been defeated, not so much by the evils they have sought
to overcome, as by their own excesses of ignorant zeal. As our knowledge
of history and of psychology increases, we learn that, in dealing with
human nature, what seems the longest way round is sometimes the shortest
way home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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